Weekly Web Harvest (weekly)

“If ever there was a scientific study that deserved to be a children’s picture book, this was it. Scientists belly-crawled through the forests of the Ozarks, flipping stones and looking for slimy things that wriggled away from them. They learned that the forest is secretly packed with salamanders in unfathomable numbers, as many as 10 times what earlier researchers had thought. The amphibians emerged as the hidden heroes of the woodland ecosystem.”

“I didn’t mean to find this out. And I really didn’t want to know that Air Buddy had to have his right hind leg amputated the same year he became a star. But I found out anyway, because I had wandered into a Wikipedia Rabbit Hole.

“We’re talking here about tiny lumps of 0.5mm across or considerably less, usually invisible to the naked eye, which often originate in cosmetics or drugs containing nanoparticles or microbeads. Such nanoparticles matter as they are similar size to the smallest forms of plankton (pico and nano plankton) which are the most abundant plankton group and biggest contributors in terms of biomass and contribution to primary production.”

Related posts

After finishing my degree in philosophy, I needed… – more than 95 theses “After finishing my degree in philosophy, I needed a career. I have no regrets pursuing my MBA at Stanford and in the various experiences that followed from that choice. Would I have done the same thing if I had, say, a trust fund paying my living expenses? Probably not. But I am more of a person today for the intellectual rigor I assimilated at the Boston Consulting Group and McKinsey, or for doing an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange. I could list many benefits I gained from these experiences, but I will cite one. The microeconomic modeling and game theory analysis I learned at the Boston Consulting Group has helped me explain developments in the history of music that I would never have understood if I had spent my entire life in the arts. “ tags: weekly blends interdisciplinary arts sciences Business McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: I’m All Caught Up! “Guys, I did it. I did it! I’m caught up! I experienced every show, movie, webisode, album, book, webcomic, podcast, video game, Twitter feed, Tumblr, Instagram, Reddit AMA, and op-ed you guys were telling me I had to check out. Now we can talk about them and I won’t feel like such an outcast when we […]

cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Tom Woodward cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Tom Woodward cc licensed ( BY SA ) flickr photo shared by Tom Woodward I’ve been talking to people quite a bit about online learning lately because of the new job. A number of conversations go back to my experience getting a master’s degree online through Virginia Tech. I was not a fan of the process. I hated every bit of it and felt completely divorced from the process. In other words, it was a lot like my usual traditional educational experience. In any case, I dealt with it by waiting until the last few days of each semester and did all the work in a few days. Today, I had to find my VT PIN so I could prove I got the master’s degree. In the search I came across the emails represented above. VT was doing their due diligence. As a matter of fact, I bet they were following some framework about “online quality.”Or the grad assistants were anyway. This program was one of the “set and forget” models that keep churning out profit with low investment of time for years. There’s very little change in content and less interaction or leveraging of student knowledge/experience. It […]

Better and better keyboards. – Massively Parallel Procrastination Pretty interesting to watch the process and the role of 3d printing. tags: keyboards 3d printing iterative design weekly The Space Review: Secrets and signs (page 1) “Those obsessed with Freemason conspiracy theories would probably go into orbit after learning that in 2000 the secretive National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) launched a satellite into spaaaaaace whose official mission patch featured a symbol nearly identical to the one on the dollar bill. While this was probably not a Freemason satellite, the “all-seeing eye” was undoubtedly intended to serve the same symbolic function as an observation satellite does in reality. More interesting to those obsessed with the NRO is the fact that the patch also features four stars hovering in the sky. Independent observers claimed that the classified satellite launched into orbit was actually the fourth of its type. Four stars. Four satellites.” tags: space patches usa symbols weekly freemason jacobsmith/chrome_extension_xkcd_1288 · GitHub That XKCD text replacement plugin source code on github because the Internet is awesome. tags: xkcd chrome plugin javascript js extension github weekly Ground Zero – Futility Closet ” But I am open to the suggestion that it is not a chained sculpture of a cat but a sculpture of a chained cat, one end of which is wittily attached to a […]